Page 127 of Faceless

“I did not say I would not. I said I was not certain.”

She closed her eyes briefly. He saw her decide. She opened them again and looked at him directly, and her hands went down between them — slowly, deliberately — and she took his hands in hers. Then she placed his palms at the insides of her knees, with her hands over his, and drew them gently apart for him.

She was open to him in the full light — flushed, soft, the secret of her unhidden at last and shining with the wanting of him — and the sight of her struck him in a way nothing in all the months of the dark ever had.

She was watching him watching her, and her colour had gone the deepest he had seen it all morning. Her mouth was slightly open, and she was holding her knees apart for him with the same steady refusal-to-be-cowed she had used on him in a dozen Hertfordshire drawing rooms, and he had never loved her so much in his life.

“Elizabeth! You are… my love, so beautiful.”

He saw a trembling at her throat as she swallowed, then a cautious breath, and she slowly eased her hips towards him.

He bent to her. He took his time about it, because he had been given a gift he had not been certain he would ever ask for and was not going to rush it. He drew the flat of his tongue against her once, slowly, and she made a sound he had never heard from her — sharp, involuntary, undisguised — and her hand left her knee and went into his hair, and he stayed with her.

He went on as he had been going on, slowly. She made the sound again — almost a keening sort of moan. Then again, this time closer to a shriek of pleasure. Each one different from the one before, each one closer to her own undoing, each one a thing he was being permitted to hear in the light, in the open, with the morning sun moving along the floor and his wife’s hand tight in his hair and his name on her breath every second or third gasp.

“Fitzw… will… Oh, good God! —”

He answered her with his mouth. She gasped again, deeper, and her hips rose against him, and her hand in his hair tightened past tightening.

“Fitzwilliam — Fitzwilliam! —”

He looked up.

Her hand was already reaching for his face. She caught his jaw and drew him up to her, and he came up her body and settled over her. She was breathing hard, and her colour was up, and her eyes were bright and wet.

“I want to see you,” she whispered against his mouth. “I want to see you when it happens. And —” She drew a breath. Her hand at the back of his neck tightened. “I want to hear you. You have been so quiet, Fitzwilliam. For months. This time, I want to hear you. I want to know what you sound like when you are as undone as I am.”

He kissed her hard. He could not have answered her any other way. He drew back enough to look at her properly — her face flushed, her hair across the pillow, her mouth open from his — and he braced himself on his forearm beside her head, he settled himself between her knees, and she lifted her hips to him.

He came into her slowly, watching her face. She drew in a breath as he did, and her eyes did not close. He stopped halfway, because she was looking at him, and he wanted to see the rest of her face do what he had only ever heard before. Her mouth opened, and her eyes went darker, and her hand at his shoulder tightened. He went the rest of the way.

Her head went back against the mattress, and a shuddering groan rocked her. Her nails at his shoulder dug in once. Her other hand came up and held his face.

“Fitz—” Her cry broke on a groan and then a soft oath as he pressed more deeply. “I need —”

“I am here. I have you, Lizzy, my love.”

He began to move. Slowly — because he had had her on a dozen interrupted timetables and a hundred patient, careful nights, and he was not going to hurry the first one in the light. She matched him almost at once, because she had been matching him in the dark for weeks, and her body knew how.

Her eyes stayed on his. He had not known what it would do to him to watch her face. He found out. The colour rising in her throat. The small hitch in her breath at the same place every time. The way her hand on his face tightened when he angled differently, and then tightened more, and then released to slide into his hair.

“Fitzwilliam.” Not a cry or a request. Just his name whispered as if she were reassuring herself that it was him.

He bent and kissed her without breaking the rhythm. He had been holding back without knowing it; he stopped. He moved into her harder, and a cry came out of him against her mouth that he had not heard from himself in his life — low, ragged, unguarded, the voice he had refused her for four months breaking out of him at last in a register he had not known he possessed.

Her legs came up around his waist, and she rose into him, and another sound went out of him into her hair, deeper. She had been waiting for him to stop being careful, so he stopped.

He had her then properly. Her hands moved over him — his shoulders, his back, the back of his neck — and her mouth was at his throat, then at his shoulder, and then she said something into his shoulder that he did not catch and did not need to.

He could see her. He could see her brow furrow when he drove into her and smooth when he drew back, see her mouth open on each breath, see the flush climb her face. He drew up enough to watch her properly, and she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, and the look she gave him then was one he had not seen on her face before — undone, ungoverned, entirely his — and it nearly finished him.

“I am — Fitzwilliam — ”

“I know. I have you.”

She crested beneath him with her eyes still open and on his, her mouth open on a word she could not articulate, and he held her gaze the whole time because he was not going to miss the seeing of it. Her eyes did not leave his even as the rest of her caught and burned under him.

He pressed his face into the curve of her throat.